The marvels and promises of the Williamsburg Bridge were fireworks that temporarily blanched out the dark shadows fears. 

Spanning the East River, the Williamsburg Bridge was a marvel of engineering when it opened in 1903. The oo’s and ah’s at the bridge opening argued more loudly than the fears, for awhile.

Pomp, roars of the crowd, 141 steamboats shrieking whistles, thunders of cannons, blasts of bugles, fluttering flags in the brisk wind and long streamers and garlands of evergreens and hemlock on every steel rib accompanied the opening of the Williamsburg Bridge on Saturday, December 19, 1903. The bridge was officially opened at 2:43 pm.

Electric lights blinked and sputtered, tons of fireworks exploded, flags caught on fire. A crowd of unruly reporters and photographers ran ahead of the parade, and Thomas A. Edison’s movie company filmed the spectacle. Thousands of onlookers lined the shores. Chinatown restauranters rushed back and forth along the streets to carry ingredients for huge batches of food for after-the-opening banquets.

Mayor Seth Low and other dignitaries with top hats and derbies marched forward from Manhattan in rough order behind the Mayoral Flag. The Brooklyn delegation march from the other direction, with both meeting and proceeding to Brooklyn.

The opening invocation was given by Rev. Dr. James H. Darlington, rector of Christ Church (Episcopal), Brooklyn, and the invocation was intoned by Rev. Father Michael J. Lavelle of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

The mayor talked about how the spectacular bridge showed that we can hardly imagine the future’s progress and declared the bridge wonderful and beautiful  (A little defensively since the newspapers had blasted the bridge as “graceless.”)

To capture the moment, we have restored the Edison movie with the addition of then popular John Phillip Sousa’s “Manhattan Beach March” (contemporary news coverage mentions the playing of Sousa tunes and “The Star Spangled Banner”)

The fireworks were spectacular.

Twenty years after the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge, a new era for Williamsburg and Greenpoint was exploding into being. With narrow, snarled funnel of the Brooklyln Bridge relieved, concourse between Manhattan and Brooklyn jumped in volume. All through Brooklyn and Queens you sense the powering up of a new urban heavy weight engine.

Most Brooklyn evangelical Protestant churches saw the bridge with a very different spiritual polarity from the views of the Manhattanites. They could have pointed to the contemporary observations of sociologist Max Weber during his visit to Manhattan and Brooklyn in 1904.

Weber saw an out-of-control secularized Protestant ethic in Manhattan of relentless work and money-making while its originators, the mainline Protestant churches, were actually fading away. The sociologist wrote that at his two dinners in Brooklyn, one in Cobble Hill and the other at Brooklyn Heights, his German friends contrasted the “more devout” Brooklyn with the godless Manhattan. Many big congregations and many small ones ran along the new transportation routes of Brooklyn and Queens. 

Brooklynites saw a rush of new settlers from Manhattan as refugees from Manhattan miseries!

Renewed faith and new prophets were needed. Might they come from Williamsburg, arising to meet the onrush of new settlers?

Boatloads of immigrants from Germany, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, and elsewhere found housing in Williamsburg and the rest of Brooklyn that was cheaper and better than that in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Those already living on the Lower East Side could also move to Brooklyn by walking across the bridge.  Lovers from the Lower East Side could meet their objects of desire on the bridge, then make their nests in Williamsburg.

Immigration and the birds-and-the-bees increase meant that the population in Williamsburg-Greenpoint became one of the densest in the nation. The population increased from 105,000 in 1900 to a high of 260,000 in 1920. Buildings were torn down, new ones put up, to be torn down again, and so forth.

The Lower East Side cycle of attraction of a  huge population of immigrants followed by deteriorating buildings started to repeat itself in Williamsburg-Greenpoint. Life-styles did became strained by the deteriorating housing and increasing poverty. Yet, there was always hope because of the number of jobs was increasing and faith options for steeling one’s heart were also proliferating.

New industries moved in and old ones expanded. Factories and warehouses became formed a nationally important center of commerce. Pfizer Pharmaceutical Company, Astral Oil (which became the giant monopolist Standard Oil), and Continental Iron Works (in Greenpoint) pumped out miracle cures, light and heat, and sturdy iron fixtures and building materials.

The Havemeyer and Elder Sugar Company (which is now Amstar), owned by Henry O Havemeyer, put the Domino stamp on the public’s very idea of sugar by inventing the small sugar carton and making the domino-sized sugar cubes that went into them.

Religious groups were forming active ventures also.

“Scene in the New Jewish Colony near the Brooklyn End of the Williamsburg Bridge 1904. Photo: Eugene L. Armbruster Photograph and Scrapbook Collection, Brooklyn Historical Society, restoration by A Journey through NYC religions

For Jewish immigrants, the bridge opened the door to housing that was a mite cheaper and a bit more cleaned up that than available on the Lower East Side. For the religious, the bridge allowed a r walking and forth between established synagogues and their homes in Williamsburg without violating Talmudic injunctions about traveling too far on the Sabbath.

The American Hebrew & Jewish Messenger wrote in 1910 that, in part because of the bridge’s opening, “South Third and neighboring streets [in Williamsburg] are Jewish streets”, and several synagogues had been developed near the Brooklyn end of the bridge.

On Sabbath days, the bridge was filled with worshippers going to synagogue from the so-called “land of devels.” The New York Herald called the bridge, “the Jews highway.”

The bridge itself became the site of a Rosh Hashanah/Yom Kippur ritual called Tashlich to throw one’s sins for the year into the flowing East River. Oh yes, one could say that the evils of the year passed on that bridge but were dumped like so much garbage into the river so that a clean, fresh-start of the new year could begin. In ancient Egypt, the Nile River was the inhabitation of an Egyptian Serpent God, a real life Devil whose head was cleaved by Moses declaring the division of the river to give salvation to Israel.

Jews Praying On Williamsburg Bridge in 1909. Courtesy of Library of Congress, , George Grantham Bain Collection

Newspaper ad for services of Williamsburg Mission to the Jews on Throop Avenue. Source: The Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

Mary C. Sherburne, a Gentile volunteer in Williamsburg, wrote a description of Cohn’s operations. She noted that “Cohn preached on Saturday afternoons and Thursday nights” at an auditorium for 160 people. On Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday he preached in English.

He even enlisted his children to distribute tracts. She noted that “Joseph started at nine years old.” The son would also lecture at churches to ask for donations and on his way home would immediately buy food because supplies were so low. Cohn spent free evenings and days going door to door in Williamsburg to talk about his faith.

The idea of Messianic Judaism slowly gained ground. Cohn opened a second branch of the Williamsburg mission and started a popular clinic on Throop Avenue with physicians from a variety of faiths. He also opened a Jewish farm in Connecticut as a retreat center.

In the 1900s the energetic Cohn started a Russian Jewish meeting. One contemporary remembered, “One Saturday afternoon, father came home and said that he had just passed the missionary store on Grand Street. ‘They are doing good business these days,’ he said. ‘As I passed, the door opened and I saw the place crowded with people.’” Other immigrant groups also founded their own churches.

In 1904 an Italian congregation founded the First Italian Baptist Church (later to become Devoe Street Baptist Church). (After Guiseppe Garibaldi’s fight to create a modern unified Italy, several of his associates became Protestant leaders in the new nation.)

In the same year, the number of Puerto Ricans coming to Williamsburg increased after the United States granted non-citizen nationality status to Puerto Ricans which meant they could freely move to the United States.

The next year Polish evangelicals founded the First Polish Baptist Church. Simultaneously, Swedish Lutherans founded the Lutheran Church of the Messiah.

The door to the Twentieth Century opened with a bang of church planting by Williamsburg and Greenpoint evangelicals. The pattern was established: a Sunday school building would gather immigrants into Bible classes taught in their languages. Then, if enough people came and leaders arose, a church would be started. As the number of people grew, and housing was developed further and further from the bridge, Sunday school buildings were thrown up and churches planted like so many spiritual way stations. Howard Johnson threw up its biggest highway rest stop in Queens.

But Brooklyn pastors warned that the devil was being let loose in Brooklyn by the devils of Manhattan.

One of the most influential church planters, Throop Presbyterian, had towered upward to over 2200 adult members and a string of Sunday schools and church plants radiating outward from the Williamsburg Bridge. The legendary hymn writer Fanny Crosby dedicated “Our Joyful Song” to honor the Sunday School leader during Throop’s jubilee celebration.

However, a pastoral speaker took the occasion to sound an alarm about the true meaning of the Williamsburg Bridge. He pointed out that social problems in Brooklyn were growing while there was a deterioration of morality among the capitalist class in Manhattan. He asked the congregation to stand up against the “wicked monopolies and trusts” of the wicked island on the west and their creation of a “great cleavage between the rich and the poor” that threatened the spiritual harmony of classes in Brooklyn. The sun rises in the East over Brooklyn but sets in darkness over Manhattan.

Multiple local news media sources were used for this article, including the fulsome coverage by The New York Times, on Sunday, December 20, 1903.

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. “Fireworks on the night of the opening of the new bridge over the East River” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1907-02. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e1-2d11-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99